Did Caligula have
a God complex?

Archaeologists from Stanford, Oxford and the American
Institute for Roman Culture have unearthed evidence that Caligula,
in an act of astonishing hubris, extended his palace to the podium
of a sacrosanct temple.

The
discovery, made during the final weeks of a month-and-a-half-long
dig this summer in the Roman Forum, appears to support accounts by
some ancient historians that the profligate but short-lived emperor
was a megalomaniac.

"It's the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth taking over St. Paul's
Cathedral as an anteroom," said Jennifer Trimble, an assistant
professor of classics. "It's outrageous."

In
late June, Trimble led a team of three graduate and nine
undergraduate students to Rome. They were joined by Darius Arya,
executive director of the American Institute for Roman Culture
(AIRC), and a team of British students headed by Andrew Wilson, the
project's field director and a senior lecturer in Roman archaeology
at Oxford.

The
goal of the dig was to explore the interaction of ancient
commercial, religious and monumental space around the edge of the
Forum. While excavating an area immediately to the south of the
Temple of Castor and Pollux (a shrine dedicated to the mythological
twin sons of Jupiter), the archaeologists say they discovered the
remains of walls and a floor foundation that almost certainly
belonged to Caligula's palace. What's more, the walls appear to
have at one time connected with the temple, they say.

Caligula was the nickname (it means "little boots") of Gaius
Caesar, who ruled from 37 to 41. According to Suetonius, a Roman
biographer and antiquarian born in 69, the emperor transformed the
temple into his vestibule. Dio Cassius, a historian born about 150,
wrote that Caligula made the temple the entrance to his
palace.

But
modern historians have been hard-pressed to believe this and other
accounts of the tyrant's despotic excesses, sexual perversity and
sadism.

"It's very hard to evaluate all these scurrilous stories,"
Trimble said. "He's been condemned in memory as a lunatic and a
really bad emperor."

Scholars also point to more tangible evidence for their
incredulity: Remains dating to the last centuries B.C. and early
second century indicate that a street once divided the palace from
the temple. Excavations of the street have turned up no evidence of
Caligulan walls or foundations. Hence, most historians have assumed
that the street remained intact throughout the first two
centuries.

The
Stanford, Oxford and AIRC archaeologists found compelling evidence
that Suetonius and Dio Cassius were right.

Telltale drains

Trimble gives Wilson, an authority on Roman hydraulics, much
of the credit for having understood the significance of a drain
that runs northward from the site of Caligula's palace and cuts
across the street just south of the Temple of Castor. Because the
street already had a drain that ran to the west, Trimble and her
colleagues wondered why it would have been necessary to construct
another one along a different alignment. Their theory: Caligula
destroyed the street to connect his palace with the temple and, as
a result, had to build a new drainage system. To Trimble, such an
act points to someone with no sense of constraints. "Caligula
associated himself with the gods," she said. "He played fast and
free with the public streets of Rome."

However, she cautioned that even though evidence points to
Caligula's divine pretensions, it does not necessarily mean he was
insane. Rather, he may have taken a cue from Eastern Mediterranean
notions of royalty. "In what is now Turkey and Egypt, there was a
tradition of rulers setting themselves up as apart from mortals,"
she said. "But in Rome, this didn't work at all. Power there was
articulated in mortal terms."

In
any case, "clearly something is very, very wrong" with the way
Caligula conceived of his authority, she added. His contemporaries,
it seems, felt the same way. A group of conspirators, including
members of his own guard, murdered him just four years after he had
assumed power.

Trimble, Wilson and Arya believe that Claudius, Caligula's
successor, demolished the palace extension to the temple and
restored the street. The scholars said they hope to return to the
site, possibly next year, to continue the excavation. Their success
in doing so depends on securing the necessary permits and funding,
according to Trimble.

Puzzle within a puzzle

In
addition, the three scholars assert that what they found during the
dig may complicate efforts to interpret the third-century marble
map of Rome -- the Forma Urbis Romae -- which now exists only in
incomplete fragments. (The fragments have been scanned and
cataloged into a computer database by a Stanford team led by
Trimble and Marc Levoy, an associate professor of computer science
and electrical engineering. The URL for the Digital Forma Urbis
Romae Project is http://formaurbis.stanford.edu.)

The
map portrays the ancient city in astounding detail. However, as
Trimble and her colleagues, who were digging in the area of
fragment 18a, have discovered, it may not actually portray the city
at one uniform time period. Rather, different aspects of the map
appear to correspond to different periods.

The
scholars suggest that the map may have been compiled using archive
records and surveys from different dates. These records were
perhaps updated from time to time, but the changes may not have
been very complete.

The
map is one of the most important sources of information about the
ancient city's layout, and its apparent lack of temporal uniformity
likely will compel historians to re-examine key assumptions about
third-century Rome.

Dog days of summer

The
archaeologists labored outdoors during some of the hottest days
Europe has experienced in decades. Outfitted with hats, sunscreen
and large supplies of water, they would begin at 7:30 a.m. and work
until 4 p.m. "The students were great," Trimble said. "They worked
heroically in unbearable conditions."

Matthew Shulman, a classics and anthropological sciences major
who plans to graduate in 2005, said it was a "fantastic team." "We
had great supervisors on site whose expertise helped those, like
myself, with no archaeological experience to learn the necessary
skills like troweling and cleaning a context, taking measurements
on a grid, and cleaning and sorting pottery," Shulman
said.

Danielle Steen, a graduate student in classics who has
participated in digs in Israel and the Eastern Mediterranean, said
she was thrilled to be working "in what was the heart of the
[Roman] Empire."

"The heat was difficult, and I believe that some of the
students were not so enthusiastic about answering the questions of
tourists all day," Steen said. "But generally I have to say that
this was one of the smoothest, most friendly excavations I have
ever participated in or heard about."

These columns are the most prominent
remains of the ancient Temple of Castor and Pollux, which may have
borne witness to an act of hubris long dismissed as exaggeration.
Archaeologists from Stanford, Oxford and the American Institute for
Roman Culture have discovered evidence that Caligula extended his
palace to annex the temple. Photo:
Jennifer Trimble